An inferentialist semantics — one that claims that the meaning of a judgement is determined by its role in reasoning — faces the problem of how to account for the seemingly noninferential transition from the perceptual to the conceptual. Robert Brandom characterises his response to this problem as ‘strong inferentialism’, claiming that in certain contexts the meaning of a judgement can be determined noninferentially, such as when a perceptual judgement is formed in response to an observation. Brandom contrasts strong inferentialism with ‘hyperinferentialism’ which has no role for these kinds of noninferential transitions. This would entail that perceptual judgements are somehow premises and conclusions of inferences, which Brandom argues would be a more consistent though ultimately unsustainable position. However, that perceptual experiences are premises and conclusions of inferences is a central claim of the recently developed active inference framework in neuroscience. Moreover, the semiotics that Charles Sanders Peirce developed late in his life can be understood as hyperinferentialist. In this paper, I argue for a reading of Peirce that emphasises the ways in which he anticipates the insights of active inference. In turn, this reading gives a naturalistically plausible account of how an inferentialist can accommodate perceptual judgements.
I am a PhD candidate at the Monash Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies (M3CS). My research focuses on the philosophy of predictive processing and active inference theories. My current work engages with the classical pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce to argue for... Read More →
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST MSB1.05
Lucretius thought of his teaching as being "of high matters". The same can be said of Plato's, whose dialogues, as J. N. Findlay said, "point beyond themselves [and] if one does not go beyond, one cannot understand them." Beyond Plato's dialogues we find a deep epistemological fabric that weaves the intellect (the mind) into a complex architecture of knowledge. Plato's luminescent column is, as we understand it, his metaphor for that which binds the intellect with its subsequent ontological categories, first and foremost its daimōn, i.e. the human being's "divine power" according to Plato. In the column, light colligates all the mental categories and also holds the "entire celestial revolution", both bound by the doctrine of Necessity. Plato's poetic, metaphoric, analogic and allegoric writing style - his solution to language's inability to convey the ineffable - shouldn't mislead us into a reductive understanding based on mysticism, whether religious, pagan, or allegorical. What we are confronted with is the first non-fragmented attempt in the West to map out the entire ontological cognitive process, a precise description of the path of "knowing", the path of a science that leads to the "perfect end".
When we try to imagine something and we form a mental image, there is indeed something that we imagine. But what settles the issue of what we are imagining? One possibility is that we imagine whatever we were trying to imagine by forming our mental image. This view respects the intuition that we have privileged access to the contents of our mental states. But it is in tension with the possibility of misidentification errors in the imagination: Sometimes, we try to imagine some object, and we end up forming a mental image of a different object because we have a false belief about what the intended object of our imagination looks like. This possibility has prompted some to claim that, sometimes, the causal origin of the mental images that we form while trying to imagine something is what determines the contents of our imaginings. This view accommodates misidentification errors, but it does so at the cost of giving up the idea that we have privileged access to the contents of our mental states. I offer a view about the source of the contents of our imaginings that accommodates misidentification errors while preserving privileged access to the contents of our imaginings.
The question of how dreams can offer personal guidance and solutions has ignited the interest of humankind for thousands of years. Nonetheless, dreams have often been considered epistemically irrelevant or even deceptive, becoming the target of sceptical debates. Burgeoning research on the function of dreaming for memory integration as well as the development of dream engineering techniques aimed at harnessing dreams for creativity and learning call for a reassessment of the role of dreaming in epistemology. This work addresses unresolved questions concerning the potential use of sleep experiences for knowledge generation. By focusing on the concept of insight and how it is employed in the scientific literature on dreaming to implicitly uphold epistemic goals, I argue that at least a subset of dream uses, when adequately constrained, disclose opportunities for epistemic exploration and expansion. I will proceed by examining three cases and the conditions under which dreams can give rise to knowledge: lucid dreaming, creative ideation at sleep onset, and waking insight following dream discussion. My goal is to show how empirical work on dream consciousness carries tacit assumptions that have far-reaching implications for the epistemology of dreaming and the use of dreams for therapeutic purposes, thus warranting conceptual analysis.
Many philosophers claim that a special inner awareness persists in the background of all our conscious states. However, various attempts to gather phenomenological evidence for this view have yielded conflicting results. The dominant alternative strategy involves considerations of a more theoretical nature, such as appealing to inner awareness as the best explanation for things like memory, attention, self-knowledge, and disorders of consciousness. But this theoretical strategy has failed to convince the sceptics since they always find alternative (and in their view, better) explanations of the target phenomena. The result is a dialectically deadlocked debate over what is supposed to be a central dimension of consciousness. This talk motivates a return to the phenomenological strategy and makes an initial case for a hitherto underutilized technique in the contemporary debate—meditation—as a way to establish the ubiquity of inner awareness.
I am a fourth year PhD student and Associate Lecturer at ANU, where I am supervised by Victoria McGeer, Frank Jackson, and Daniel Stoljar. My main area of specialization is the philosophy of mind, and more specifically on various issues about consciousness and self-consciousness... Read More →
Proponents of the “inquisitive theory of mind” argue that intentions are among the attitudes which are question sensitive. Understood this way, to form an intention is to settle on an answer to a ‘practical questions,’ a question about what to do. But what is an answer to a practical question, and what is it to “settle” on one answer over others? In this paper I argue that, contra the extant question-sensitive theory of intention (Beddor & Goldstein 2023), settling on an answer to a practical question involves being in a mental state with imperative content. Hence, the question-sensitivity of intention recommends against the standard view on which intentions are attitudes toward propositional contents. On the view I defend, Imperativism, to intend to φ is to occupy a mental state with content akin to the imperative “φ!” in natural language. Imperativism is closely related to the most widely discussed non-propositionalist theory, the “do-ables view,” on which the content of an intention is an infinitival clause (e.g., “to φ”). While both the do-ables view and Imperativism capture the intuitive sense in which the objects of our intentions are acts, I show that only Imperativism can be plausibly squared with question-sensitivity.
Imagination is an intriguing faculty of our mind. Its objects often do not exist in the external world but entirely within the mental, such as the “golden mountain.” However, there are limits to imagination when paradoxical concepts such as the “round square” are examined. Such concepts disclose the logical contradiction away from possible worlds and locate themselves in the impossible, also referred to as non-sense. But as Wittgenstein suggests, even non-sense can retain meaning in certain contexts, through language games or philosophical play. This paper will examine the limits of imagination by exploring the objects of imagination and their non-sense, often reflected in language. Further, the study will compare the philosophical non-sense to the psychoanalytical non-sense. By aligning the philosophical concern of the impossible with Lacan’s interpretation of the unconscious, this study contends that non-sense, when viewed through the functioning of the unconscious, becomes intelligible and does not mark an epistemic failure rather unravels the unconscious meaning that resists representation. Thus, letting the logical limits of thought serve as a pathway to its meaning, suggesting that non-sense can itself be meaningful.
Whole-brain simulation seems to support mind uploading if computational functionalism about consciousness is true. Implementationists deny this: a digital brain model running on a computer may represent rather than implement consciousness-relevant computation. Dung and Kersten (2025) argue that such constraints cannot be general conditions on computational implementation, since mainstream theories imply that ordinary computers implement computations, whereas implementationist constraints would rule out such systems. I argue that this response moves too quickly. Implementationist constraints are, in fact, substantively equivalent to constraints in mainstream theories of physical computation: computational structure must be borne by objective mechanistic, causal, or dynamical processes. Strictly applied, these theories may not license high-level software implementation. They distinguish low-level physical/digital computations from the looser sense in which computer science says machines “implement” programs. On this reading, implementationists can deny that ordinary computers implement the high-level computation described by a brain model, without denying that they implement some lower-level computation. This does not refute mind uploading. Rather, it clarifies its hardest challenge: computationalist defenders of simulated consciousness must explain how that possibility remains open while taking seriously the prima facie appeal of implementationist theories that privilege objective physical processes.
Panpsychism, the view that phenomenal consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality, gained significant attention in the recent decades as a potentially better alternative to physicalism or substance dualism. However, panpsychism runs into a serious problem—the combination problem—according to which the multiplicity of microphenomenally conscious particles somehow combine into a macrophenomenal consciousness that we have. Very recently, Kadic (2024) proposed a version of panpsychism which he calls monadic panpsychism. This version comes in two main varieties: dynamic version and global version. The former states that microphenomenally conscious particles stand in causal relations such that they make one particle macrophenomenally conscious. The latter states that the same causal process makes all particles conscious. In both cases, macrophenomenal consciousness is explained by avoiding all of the problems that hunt its alternatives. In this paper, I explore monadic panpsychism by raising objections and solving them in its favor. To solve all objections I appeal to the theory of evolution. The first objection is the incredulous stare problem according to which both versions of monadic panpsychism have a low prior probability. I argue that evolution could in principle either produce an organism which contains a single macrophenomenal particle, or an organism which contains a large totality of macrophenomenal particles. Given that to be the case, we should increase our credences about both versions of monadic panpsychism. Also, monadic panpsychism and evolution are similar in a sense that they contain elements of apparent arbitrariness in their theories. The second problem is the selection problem against the dynamic version in particular: why is this particle dominant but not some other one? I respond that evolution could select for a mechanism which randomly chooses particles to be dominant, even though, I admit that there are residual questions that cannot be answered even by evolution. Lastly, I compare two versions of monadic panpsychism in general and I conclude that we should: (i) increase our credences in both versions of monadic panpsychism, and that (ii) we might favor the global version over the dynamic version so far.
Does the qualitative "sting" of past pain inevitably elude our mnemonic grasp? This paper argues that the qualitative character of pain is best understood as a measure of presentness. Building on Montero’s observation that pain is inherently "occurrent," I propose an interpretation wherein occurrent states denote strictly "new" sensations. I evaluate the work of Coninx and de Brigard, who suggest that episodic memory can involve genuine sensory re-experiencing of past pain. I contend, however, that these sensations are not retrieved qualitative states but are instead novel, "new" pains triggered by the present act of recollection. By analyzing de Brigard’s account of permissible pain recollection alongside recent neuropsychological findings, I demonstrate that these sensations fail to escape characterization as occurrent, present states. I conclude that pain is phenomenologically indexed to the "now"; to "remember" the feeling of pain is not to travel back in time, but to generate a new qualitative state in the present. This suggests that the very nature of pain serves as a biological and experiential marker of temporal presence.
Phenomenological theories of pleasure, according to which pleasures are constituted by a common phenomenal quality, face the seemingly intractable heterogeneity problem: that pleasures feel too phenomenally heterogeneous to be constituted by a common phenomenal quality. First, I argue that the heterogeneity problem is forceful mainly due to the isolatability requirement, according to which the pleasure-making quality, if phenomenal, must also be isolatable. Second, I argue that we should reject the isolatability requirement as it assumes that the pleasure-making quality is sufficiently sensation-like. Third, I argue that phenomenological theories, of both the distinctive feeling and hedonic tone kinds, have the resources necessary to reject the isolatability requirement. Finally, I conclude that without the isolatability requirement, the heterogeneity problem loses much of its force against phenomenological theories, and phenomenological theories become as plausible, if not more plausible than its chief rival, attitudinal theories.
Masters Research Scholar, National University of Singapore
Hi, I’m Jolly! My primary research concerns the nature of pleasure. I’m currently working on defending a commonsensical view of pleasure’s nature, phenomenological theories of pleasure, according to which pleasure is essentially a feeling. I’ll be presenting this research... Read More →
Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST MSB1.05
The boundary problem is a component of the hard problem of consciousness. Whereas the binding problem is concerned with what unifies different experiential components (e.g. sights and sounds) within a co-conscious whole, the boundary problem is concerned with what puts an end to unification—what prevents my experience from ‘spilling over’ and incorporating your experience, say. Many inventive solutions to the boundary problem have been offered, e.g. phenomenal bonding relations in panpsychism, and topological segmentations in EM-field theories of consciousness. But, whatever their merits, there hasn't been much serious questioning as to whether experience does, in fact, have boundaries. I’d like to advance a deflationary account which denies boundaries. I take analogous views in the metaphysics of time and personal identity as precedents. One upshot of this account is to dissolve the boundary problem, making the hard problem a bit easier in that respect.
Empathy was introduced to philosophy as a solution to the problem of other minds skepticism, the doubt whether other minds exist at all, which arises from the Cartesian dualist picture of the mind as metaphysically hidden (Lipps 1907). Already in Lipps’s work, and from then on into contemporary philosophical discussion, empathy in its various forms is commonly seen as our way to know what specific minds believe and feel and desire in specific scenarios. In this paper, I focus on affective empathy, usually seen as the success of a simulation effort, where one tries to adopt the perspective of another and imagine oneself in the other’s situation (e.g. Coplan 2011). I shall argue that this attempt is resting on a misguided notion of similarity between two people, and that the epistemic stance simulation involves is objectifying and obliterating of the other’s individuality. Relying on the work of the psychoanalyst Neville Symington (2018), I propose a new associative-imaginative account of affective empathy, which involves the surrender of the epistemic position and a genuine moment of a communion in feeling.
